This invention pertains to a cup and more particularly to a cup for dispensing dry medication.
The psychological and physiological difficulties experienced by many persons in swallowing tablets or pills are well known. The usual method is to place the medication in the mouth or on the tongue with the fingers, and then to swallow the medication with the use of one or more mouthfuls of liquid. Many people, however, experience gagging or nausea during the time interval between placing the pills in the mouth and taking the drink of liquid to wash them down. To minimize the incidence of contamination, hospitals place the medication in a small paper cup which the patient should then use to transfer the tablets to the mouth, then drink the liquid from another cup. The necessity for dispensing the medication from stock to the small cup, transporting it to the patient while assuring positive identification, and supplying sufficient liquid in another container can be a time consuming function, and does nothing to overcome the difficulties the recipient may have ingesting the dosage.
To overcome some of these problems some prior art devices of this type utilize a cup in which a shelf or receptacle is positioned on the interior side of the wall of the cup for holding the medicine which is to be dispensed. See for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,264,539; 1,275,467; 1,825,339; 2,276,678; 2,656,837; 2,919,694; 2,940,447; 3,331,369; 3,534,736 and 3,810,470. Such a shelf is sometimes provided with grooves or holes in order to let the fluid within the cup wash through the shelf and carry the medicine with it into the mouth of the recipient. One difficulty with such prior art devices is that the dry medication must be carefully placed upon the shelf or else it will be accidentally dropped into the fluid resulting in a wastage of the medicine, since such medicine would not be palatable to the recipient at that point.
Still another problem is that such a shelf on the interior sidewall of the cup makes it difficult to stack or nest such cups in any great quantity, such as thirty or more.
Still a further problem is that the medicine must be placed on the shelf just before the cup is given to the recipient or else the jostling of the cup in delivering it to the patient may splash the liquid up onto the shelf and wet the medication. Also, there is the problem that liquid which has splashed onto the support shelf prior to the depositing of the medicine will cause the medicine to prematurely dissolve or stick to the shelf.